Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Ineffable Pictures plans to adapt Declan Hill's bestselling non-fiction book The Fix into a crime drama for television. (More details about the book, below.)

"Everyone knows that soccer is far and away the world's most popular sport. However, it wasn't until I read Declan's book that I realized that the criminal aspect surrounding it might be even bigger," said Ineffable Pictures CEO Raphael Kryszek. "This will undoubtedly set the framework for a captivating piece of television."

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The Fix: Soccer and Organized CrimeDeclan Hill

Author Declan Hill comes face-to-face with the multi-billion dollar illegal Asian gambling industry. Over four years, he interviewed more than two hundred people, including professional gamblers, Mafia hitmen, undercover cops, top-level international soccer players, referees, and officials. He met men who claim they have bribed their way into fixing the results of some of the biggest matches in the sport. Initially very sceptical, Hill travelled across four continents to corroborate their stories. He found soccer leagues where mobsters have fixed more than eighty per cent of the games. But most chilling, he met and then was adopted by a small group of match-fixers.

In The Fix, Hill explains the structure and mechanics of illegal gambling syndicates, what soccer players and referees do (or not do) to affect the outcome of their games, why relatively rich and high-status athletes would fix games, how and why club officials would bribe the opposition and how they get referees "on their side". Perhaps most shocking is Hill's discovery that gambling fixers have successfully infiltrated the game, all the way to the top international matches.

The book, however, is not just about match fixing in soccer, the world's most popular sport. Throughout the text, Hill uses examples from other sports — tennis, hockey, even rowing — to show that the credibility of professional sport now lies on a fragile foundation, and it provides enough hints to suspect that all sports above amateur level should look nervously over their shoulder.

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Lance Wright owns and manages Omnimystery, a Family of Mystery Websites, which had its origin as Hidden Staircase Mystery Books in 1986. As the scope of the business expanded, first into book reviews — Mysterious Reviews — and later into information for and reviews of mystery and suspense television and film, all sites were consolidated under the Omnimystery brand in 2006.